City of Heroes First Impressions

GameSpy has put together their first impressions of City of Heroes, the newly released superhero MMORPG from Cryptic Studios. An excerpt, as usual:
Inside the game world you'll meet "contacts" -- civilians in the city with all the right connections who can tip you off whenever your skills are needed. From your contacts you'll get missions, which require you to -- no surprise here -- beat on some bad guys. Missions will all have their own little backstory, and sometimes they'll chain together into big story arcs that can take you a few hours to completely unravel. That said, don't expect a tremendous amount of variety: City of Heroes is basically an action game, where most of the city's problems are solved by wailing away on villains with your assortment of superpowers.

That's the heart of it. There's no player-housing, no crafting skills, no complex player-economy, no auctions, and no player merchants. This is a game about super-powered combat alone or in teams, so every scrap of game design supports that. Power-ups or power enhancements will drop directly into your inventory as you fight, so combat rarely has to stop for anything. And combat is fun! There's nothing quite so awe-inspiring as a phalanx of super-powered crime fighters sweeping through a crowd of criminals with explosive special effects bursting left and right. It's quick, it's dirty, and it's damn entertaining.